Research

Settore scientifico disciplinare di attività: INF/01 - INFORMATICA
His main research interests include non-monotonic reasoning, non-classical logics (in particular, conditional and preferential logics), non-monotonic extensions of description logics, and logic programming.
Conditional logics have a long history, and recently they have found interesting applications in several areas of artificial intelligence, including belief revision and update, the representation of causal inferences in action planning, the formalization of hypothetical queries in deductive databases. Conditional logics have also been applied to non-monotonic reasoning. A fundamental contribution to the study of the relation between conditional logics and non-monotonic reasoning has been given by Kraus, Lehmann and Magidor, who have introduced the so called KLM framework. The KLM framework has been introduced in order to describe a set of properties that any concrete non-monotonic reasoning system should satisfy. The logics of this framework are called preferential logics.
The family of Description Logics (DLs) represents one of the most important formalism of knowledge representation. DLs have a well-defined semantics based on first order logic and offer a good trade-off between expressivity and complexity. Since the very objective of a DL knowledge base is to represent a taxonomy of concepts, the need of representing prototypical properties and to reason about inheritance with exceptions easily arises. Standard DLs do not allow to reason about defeasible properties. His recent research is focused on extending standrd DLs with a typicality operator, in order to define defeasible properties and to reason about eceptions.